number 32 • Summer 2017

Authors

Jim Manzi

articles

The political debate over climate change has long resembled a contest to see which party can discredit itself more. Liberals have seized upon outlandishly improbable climate scenarios to urge a drastic and counterproductive left-wing economic agenda, while conservatives deny some straightforward evidence to avoid confronting the need for even modest policy steps. Of the two, conservatives are doing their cause the greater harm. Taking account of the basic facts about climate change would undermine the left's crusade and point the way toward letting technology and markets address the risks we confront.

There is much talk in Washington now about the need to supercharge innovation to break out of our economic rut, but not much of a sense of exactly what that means. Each party just assumes that its old, tried-and-true policies will help spur innovation — and both are right in part and wrong in part. By looking back at how Americans have managed, time and again, to remake our economy into an engine of innovation and prosperity, we can better understand the nature of the challenge we now face and the kinds of responses most likely to work.

Every capitalist economy faces a conflict between economic innovation and social cohesion. For America, the effort to balance the two is made all the more difficult by the growing cultural gap between the rich and the poor. We have managed to avoid confronting this challenge for decades, but the economic crisis and increasing global competition mean we can no longer ignore it. How can we — and how should we — strike a balance between a prosperous economy and a thriving society?